Essential Bukowski: Poetry

Essential Bukowski: Poetry Abel Debritto Charles Bukowski ‘The best poet in America’ Jean Genet‘He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels’ Leonard CohenThe definitive collection from a writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, acutely observant writing has left an enduring markHere is Bukowski eating walnuts and scratching his back, rolling a cigarette while listening to Brahms, showering with Linda in the mid-afternoon.Here is Bukowski knowing that the secret is beyond him, that people who never go crazy live truly horrible lives, that there’s a bluebird in his heart that wants to get out.Here is Bukowski at his most hilarious and heart-breaking, his most raw and profound; here is Bukowski at his best. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_eec25874-deb1-5eac-9d78-5a5224618d6d) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk) This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2016 First published in the United States by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2016 Copyright © 2016 by Linda Lee Bukowski Cover photograph of Charles Bukowski by Mark Hanauer Charles Bukowski asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Source ISBN: 9780008225155 Ebook Edition © October 2016 ISBN: 9780008225162 Version: 2016-10-21 CONTENTS Cover (#u1d8d7f6a-231d-553c-9848-61d3565ca740) Title Page (#u1bf851d6-c3cf-5318-ac45-4bb4b4cc2a96) Copyright (#ue8c28262-d87d-5955-82d6-8006fa004b78) Introduction (#uaeff3ef9-1fc6-55f2-b48a-9c3392c4bb95) friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too (#u9e159778-bc4b-53aa-aec1-e4bff8575427) as the sparrow (#ulink_f65f45db-a039-51b6-87d2-b4e4aa715766) layover (#ulink_3f291e67-6d46-55f7-87f6-5151c725574f) the life of Borodin (#ulink_796e6c3a-6eef-54d9-81f6-a6b0f89ce2e0) when Hugo Wolf went mad (#ulink_a6145996-c0ac-5a52-839b-faf4fd3e26cd) destroying beauty (#ulink_0261f684-436c-595f-886e-8c07ff442cc0) the day I kicked a bankroll out the window (#ulink_28134f0c-2ff5-533c-b0b7-853326e05ec0) the twins (#ulink_b5ce355e-e692-592b-9ffe-64ccd1c2b1e5) to the whore who took my poems (#ulink_cc01b2fa-0331-5153-be19-44ea4478db97) the loser (#ulink_04d2e233-b98a-5ff8-9ba8-e98fead8a9b7) the best way to get famous is to run away (#ulink_5637087b-99ee-585a-a14f-3391bf85f602) the tragedy of the leaves (#ulink_1eb4917f-8caa-560c-a4c9-d1c7609d92dd) old man, dead in a room (#ulink_4578a6b5-379d-5b30-8a82-23ba036de1a9) the priest and the matador (#ulink_a51f72cb-2ea3-5b64-b4d3-16cb78e2a334) the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window (#ulink_0db89134-422f-5605-b98c-b48d7ebea381) the swan (#ulink_6ffd7e27-a14e-5534-ba16-6c289bca9742) beans with garlic (#ulink_94946bb1-23b0-575d-8e84-26e5ec11c429) a poem is a city (#ulink_2090ca06-5018-5c87-9210-192c69db740e) consummation of grief (#ulink_24127079-875f-5263-8bb4-de680efb820a) for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough (#ulink_5f3a1ef0-4427-5719-a6c4-5dc584cd086b) for Jane (#ulink_8b6972a9-efeb-51a2-961b-edae8a7029a0) john dillinger and le chasseur maudit (#ulink_e8c7d02f-32ee-5757-a9d0-da5ad3c27d9c) crucifix in a deathhand (#litres_trial_promo) something for the touts, the nuns, the grocery clerks and you . . . (#litres_trial_promo) no. 6 (#litres_trial_promo) and the moon and the stars and the world: (#litres_trial_promo) true story (#litres_trial_promo) the genius of the crowd (#litres_trial_promo) I met a genius (#litres_trial_promo) swastika star buttoned to my ass (#litres_trial_promo) the blackbirds are rough today (#litres_trial_promo) If we take— (#litres_trial_promo) another academy (#litres_trial_promo) the poetry reading (#litres_trial_promo) the last days of the suicide kid (#litres_trial_promo) the shower (#litres_trial_promo) the mockingbird (#litres_trial_promo) style (#litres_trial_promo) girl in a miniskirt reading the Bible outside my window (#litres_trial_promo) the shoelace (#litres_trial_promo) those sons of bitches (#litres_trial_promo) hot (#litres_trial_promo) trouble with Spain (#litres_trial_promo) a radio with guts (#litres_trial_promo) some people never go crazy (#litres_trial_promo) the fisherman (#litres_trial_promo) the trash men (#litres_trial_promo) face of a political candidate on a street billboard (#litres_trial_promo) the proud thin dying (#litres_trial_promo) an almost made up poem (#litres_trial_promo) a love poem for all the women I have known (#litres_trial_promo) art (#litres_trial_promo) what they want (#litres_trial_promo) one for the shoeshine man (#litres_trial_promo) the meek have inherited (#litres_trial_promo) who in the hell is Tom Jones? (#litres_trial_promo) and a horse with greenblue eyes walks on the sun (#litres_trial_promo) an acceptance slip (#litres_trial_promo) the end of a short affair (#litres_trial_promo) I made a mistake (#litres_trial_promo) $$$$$$ (#litres_trial_promo) metamorphosis (#litres_trial_promo) we’ve got to communicate (#litres_trial_promo) the secret of my endurance (#litres_trial_promo) Carson McCullers (#litres_trial_promo) sparks (#litres_trial_promo) the history of a tough motherfucker (#litres_trial_promo) oh, yes (#litres_trial_promo) retirement (#litres_trial_promo) luck (#litres_trial_promo) cornered (#litres_trial_promo) how is your heart? (#litres_trial_promo) the burning of the dream (#litres_trial_promo) hell is a lonely place (#litres_trial_promo) the strongest of the strange (#litres_trial_promo) 8 count (#litres_trial_promo) we ain’t got no money, honey, but we got rain (#litres_trial_promo) flophouse (#litres_trial_promo) the soldier, his wife and the bum (#litres_trial_promo) no leaders (#litres_trial_promo) Dinosauria, we (#litres_trial_promo) nirvana (#litres_trial_promo) the bluebird (#litres_trial_promo) the secret (#litres_trial_promo) fan letter (#litres_trial_promo) to lean back into it (#litres_trial_promo) the condition book (#litres_trial_promo) a new war (#litres_trial_promo) the laughing heart (#litres_trial_promo) roll the dice (#litres_trial_promo) so now? (#litres_trial_promo) the crunch (#litres_trial_promo) Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo) About the Authors (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Charles Bukowski (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_c5a7be43-80fb-5638-a4f9-f29ba013cd33) With more than twenty Charles Bukowski poetry books now available in print and dozens of first-rate unpublished poems on file, an essential collection has been long overdue. The task at hand was titanic: A prolific author by any measure, with some five thousand poems on record written over a span of fifty years, Bukowski famously wrote almost every night in an alcoholic stupor, trashing most of the gibberish the morning after. Picking Bukowski’s best poems out of this massive heap was daunting, to say the least. “The bluebird,” “the genius of the crowd,” “roll the dice,” “the crunch,” and other popular poems were strong contenders even before I put together a tentative list. As I pored over both the published and the unpublished work, some relatively obscure gems, such as “when Hugo Wolf went mad,” “sparks,” “the loser,” and “another academy” came back to life for me. I also included poems that were pivotal in Bukowski’s career, like “swastika star buttoned to my ass,” which moved longtime German translator, agent, and friend Carl Weissner to become a fervent Bukowski enthusiast after reading it in a small press magazine in England in 1966. There were one hundred and seventy poems in my final selection for the book, which then had to be cut down to only ninety-two—“democracy,” “they, all of them, know,” “the word,” and other top-notch poems had to be discarded. These ninety-two essential poems barely represent two percent of Bukowski’s mammoth output, but his poetic evolution is hard to miss in this chronological collection. The early poems, with their lyricism and occasional surreal imagery, give way in the 1970s to Bukowski’s “Dirty Old Man” macho persona, when he finally achieves success in his fifties, after which he takes, in his final years, a more philosophical stance on life. Through it all, what remains the same is Bukowski’s brilliance at capturing things as they are, his crystal-clear snapshots of his immediate experiences as well as the world at large, which he hardly ever photoshopped after the fact. It is precisely this genuineness, along with the timeless quality of Bukowski’s most accomplished poems, that makes us embrace his poetry with open arms: the day-to-day but crucial trivialities found in “the shoelace”; the sensuality of “the shower”; the forces of life at work in “the mockingbird” and “the history of a tough motherfucker”; the elusive nature of art in many of the poems; the self-deprecating humor in “we’ve got to communicate”; the imperfection that makes us almost perfect in “one for the shoeshine man”; and the heartfelt portraits of the artists that Bukowski looks up to. There’s also the striking, disarming simplicity of “art” and “nirvana”; the Hemingwayesque spare lines of “Carson McCullers” and “hell is a lonely place”; the hymns to individualism and willpower of “no leaders” and “the genius of the crowd”; the never-take-things-for-granted spirit of “I met a genius”; the long narrative poems that read as well-paced short-stories; and the life-affirming drive of “the laughing heart” and “the crunch.” These last two poems show that, despite the darkness that often entered his life and poetry, Bukowski always saw the light at the end of the tunnel, and we can’t help but identify with that feeling. These poems are Bukowski at his most captivating: unvarnished, witty, and passionate, showing us all “the way” as he listens to classical music on “a radio with guts” and drinks “the blood of the gods” in his small Los Angeles apartments and studios. The Buddha of San Pedro, Bukowski ultimately smiles because he knows the secret of it all is way beyond him, and that’s the beauty of it: Bukowski distills life to its very essence, squeezing the magic out of the ordinary with his unmistakable, surpassing simplicity. Essential, indeed. friendly advice to a lot of young men, and a lot of old men, too (#ulink_60ae5aad-e44f-5a0d-a428-56f0e4d0fc25) Go to Tibet. Ride a camel. Read the Bible. Paint your shoes blue. Grow a beard. Circle the world in a paper canoe. Subscribe to the Saturday Evening Post. Chew on the left side of your mouth only. Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor. And carve your name in her anus. Brush your teeth with gasoline. Sleep all day and climb trees at night. Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer. Hold your head under water and play the violin. Do a belly dance before pink candles. Kill your dog. Run for mayor. Live in a barrel. Break your head with a hatchet. Plant tulips in the rain. But don’t write any more poetry. as the sparrow (#ulink_5921a671-187d-54e0-add9-f3223c934fde) To give life you must take life, and as our grief falls flat and hollow upon the billion-blooded sea I pass upon serious inward-breaking shoals rimmed with white-legged, white-bellied rotting creatures lengthily dead and rioting against surrounding scenes. Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love. layover (#ulink_d02765df-b6cd-53cd-a795-9588940133ca) Making love in the sun, in the morning sun in a hotel room above the alley where poor men poke for bottles; making love in the sun making love by a carpet redder than our blood, making love while the boys sell headlines and Cadillacs, making love by a photograph of Paris and an open pack of Chesterfields, making love while other men—poor fools— work. That moment—to this . . . may be years in the way they measure, but it’s only one sentence back in my mind— there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops. the life of Borodin (#ulink_1aa45ddb-2444-5d92-950c-3d5694ad4122) the next time you listen to Borodin remember he was just a chemist who wrote music to relax; his house was jammed with people: students, artists, drunkards, bums, and he never knew how to say “no.” the next time you listen to Borodin remember his wife used his compositions to line the cat boxes with or to cover jars of sour milk; she had asthma and insomnia and fed him soft-boiled eggs and when he wanted to cover his head to hide out the sounds of the house she only allowed him to use the sheet; besides there was usually somebody in his bed (they slept separately when they slept at all) and since all the chairs were usually taken he often slept on the stairway wrapped in an old shawl; she told him when to cut his nails, not to sing or whistle or put too much lemon in his tea or press it with a spoon; Symphony #2 in B MinorPrince IgorIn the Steppes of Central Asia he could sleep only by putting a piece of dark cloth over his eyes; in 1887 he attended a dance at the Medical Academy dressed in a merrymaking national costume; at last, he seemed exceptionally gay and when he fell to the floor, they thought he was clowning. the next time you listen to Borodin, remember . . . when Hugo Wolf went mad (#ulink_c16343cc-29ea-501c-8e3a-0b5075812fb0) Hugo Wolf went mad while eating an onion and writing his 253rd song; it was rainy April and the worms came out of the ground humming Tannh?user, and he spilled his milk with his ink, and his blood fell out to the walls and he howled and he roared and he screamed, and down- stairs his landlady said, I knew it, that rotten son of a bitch has dummied up his brain, he’s jacked-off his last piece of music and now I’ll never get the rent, and someday he’ll be famous and they’ll bury him in the rain, but right now I wish he’d shut up that god damned screaming—for my money he’s a silly pansy jackass and when they move him out of here, I hope they move in a good solid fisherman or a hangman or a seller of biblical tracts. destroying beauty (#ulink_091a00b8-0010-5f05-8e1f-fbf670ab48dd) a rose red sunlight; I take it apart in the garage like a puzzle: the petals are as greasy as old bacon and fall like the maidens of the world backs to floor and I look up at the old calendar hung from a nail and touch my wrinkled face and smile because the secret is beyond me. the day I kicked a bankroll out the window (#ulink_91c1a6a4-c171-5725-a7ae-06d772411d04) and, I said, you can take your rich aunts and uncles and grandfathers and fathers and all their lousy oil and their seven lakes and their wild turkey and buffalo and the whole state of Texas, meaning, your crow-blasts and your Saturday night boardwalks, and your 2-bit library and your crooked councilmen and your pansy artists— you can take all these and your weekly newspaper and your famous tornadoes and your filthy floods and all your yowling cats and your subscription to Life, and shove them, baby, shove them. I can handle a pick and ax again (I think) and I can pick up 25 bucks for a 4-rounder (maybe); sure, I’m 38 but a little dye can pinch the gray out of my hair; and I can still write a poem (sometimes), don’t forget that, and even if they don’t pay off, it’s better than waiting for death and oil, and shooting wild turkey, and waiting for the world to begin. all right, bum, she said, get out. what? I said. get out. you’ve thrown your last tantrum. I’m tired of your damned tantrums: you’re always acting like a character in an O’Neill play. but I’m different, baby, I can’t help it. you’re different, all right! God, how different! don’t slam the door when you leave. but, baby, I love your money! you never once said you loved me! what do you want a liar or a lover? you’re neither! out, bum, out! . . . but baby! go back to O’Neill! I went to the door, softly closed it and walked away, thinking: all they want is a wooden Indian to say yes and no and stand over the fire and not raise too much hell; but you’re getting to be an old man, kiddo: next time play it closer to the vest. the twins (#ulink_0b630cfc-bb3a-5ab6-b125-391adc03ea62) he hinted at times that I was a bastard and I told him to listen to Brahms, and I told him to learn to paint and drink and not be dominated by women and dollars but he screamed at me, For Christ’s sake remember your mother, remember your country, you’ll kill us all! . . . I move through my father’s house (on which he owed $8,000 after 20 years on the same job) and look at his dead shoes the way his feet curled the leather, as if he was angrily planting roses, and he was, and I look at his dead cigarette, his last cigarette and the last bed he slept in that night, and I feel I should remake it but I can’t, for a father is always your master even when he’s gone; I guess these things have happened time and again but I can’t help thinking to die on a kitchen floor at 7 o’clock in the morning while other people are frying eggs is not so rough unless it happens to you. I go outside and pick an orange and peel back the bright skin; things are still living: the grass is growing quite well, the sun sends down its rays circled by a Russian satellite, a dog barks senselessly somewhere, the neighbors peek behind blinds. I am a stranger here, and have been (I suppose) somewhat the rogue, and I have no doubt he painted me quite well (the old boy and I fought like mountain lions) and they say he left it all to some woman in Duarte but I don’t give a damn—she can have it: he was my old man and he died. inside, I try on a light blue suit much better than anything I have ever worn and I flap the arms like a scarecrow in the wind but it’s no good: I can’t keep him alive no matter how much we hated each other. we looked exactly alike, we could have been twins the old man and I: that’s what they said. he had his bulbs on the screen ready for planting while I was lying with a whore from 3rd Street. very well. grant us this moment: standing before a mirror in my dead father’s suit waiting also to die. to the whore who took my poems (#ulink_e289318a-d338-5c0c-97df-382f7427823e) some say we should keep personal remorse from the poem, stay abstract, and there is some reason in this, but jezus: 12 poems gone and I don’t keep carbons and you have my paintings too, my best ones; it’s stifling: are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them? why didn’t you take my money? they usually do from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner. next time take my left arm or a fifty but not my poems: I’m not Shakespeare but sometimes simply there won’t be any more, abstract or otherwise; there’ll always be money and whores and drunkards down to the last bomb, but as God said, crossing his legs, I see where I have made plenty of poets but not so very much poetry. the loser (#ulink_727c1a29-0911-5b23-ad2f-58cf06013c16) and the next I remembered I’m on a table, everybody’s gone: the head of bravery under light, scowling, flailing me down . . . and then some toad stood there, smoking a cigar: “Kid, you’re no fighter,” he told me, and I got up and knocked him over a chair; it was like a scene in a movie, and he stayed there on his big rump and said over and over: “Jesus, Jesus, whatsamatta wit you?” and I got up and dressed, the tape still on my hands, and when I got home I tore the tape off my hands and wrote my first poem, and I’ve been fighting ever since. the best way to get famous is to run away (#ulink_07d6f08c-4d65-5f08-82a8-62bb2bfd4c99) I found a loose cement slab outside the ice-cream store, tossed it aside and began to dig; the earth was soft and full of worms and soon I was in to my waist, size 36; a crowd gathered but stepped back before my shots of mud, and by the time the police came, I was in below my head, frightening gophers, eels and finding bits of golden inlaid skull, and they asked me, are you looking for oil, treasure, gold, the end of China? are you looking for love, God, a lost key chain? and little girls dripping ice-cream peered into my darkness, and a psychiatrist came and a college professor and a movie actress in a bikini, and a Russian spy and a French spy and an English spy, and a drama critic and a bill collector and an old girlfriend, and they all asked me, what are you looking for? and soon it began to rain . . . atomic submarines changed course, Tuesday Weld hid behind a newspaper, Jean-Paul Sartre rolled in his sleep, and my hole filled with water; I came out black as Africa, shooting stars and epitaphs, my pockets full of lovely worms, and they took me to their jail and gave me a shower and a nice cell, rent-free, and even now the people are picketing in my cause, and I have signed contracts to appear on the stage and television, to write a guest column for the local paper and write a book and endorse some products, I have enough money to last me several years at the best hotels, but as soon as I get out of here, I’m gonna find me another loose slab and begin to dig, dig, dig, and this time I’m not coming back . . . rain, shine, or bikini, and the reporters keep asking, why did you do it? but I just light my cigarette and smile . . . the tragedy of the leaves (#ulink_b1582e28-deec-5b18-bfb0-0f3481afb7f2) I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead, the potted plants yellow as corn; my woman was gone and the empty bottles like bled corpses surrounded me with their uselessness; the sun was still good, though, and my landlady’s note cracked in fine and undemanding yellowness; what was needed now was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd because it exists, nothing more; I shaved carefully with an old razor the man who had once been young and said to have genius; but that’s the tragedy of the leaves, the dead ferns, the dead plants; and I walked into a dark hall where the landlady stood execrating and final, sending me to hell, waving her fat, sweaty arms and screaming screaming for rent because the world had failed us both. old man, dead in a room (#ulink_72ceda9f-e3e0-5eb1-aff0-c497dc75c04e) this thing upon me is not death but it’s as real, and as landlords full of maggots pound for rent I eat walnuts in the sheath of my privacy and listen for more important drummers; it’s as real, it’s as real as the broken-boned sparrow cat-mouthed to utter more than mere and miserable argument; between my toes I stare at clouds, at seas of gaunt sepulcher . . . and scratch my back and form a vowel as all my lovely women (wives and lovers) break like engines into some steam of sorrow to be blown into eclipse; bone is bone but this thing upon me as I tear the window shades and walk caged rugs, this thing upon me like a flower and a feast, believe me is not death and is not glory and like Quixote’s windmills makes a foe turned by the heavens against one man; . . . this thing upon me, great god, this thing upon me crawling like a snake, terrifying my love of commonness, some call Art some call poetry; it’s not death but dying will solve its power and as my gray hands drop a last desperate pen in some cheap room they will find me there and never know my name my meaning nor the treasure of my escape. the priest and the matador (#ulink_5229c552-76e4-5bc5-9527-733bcfb4a8bc) in the slow Mexican air I watched the bull die and they cut off his ear, and his great head held no more terror than a rock. driving back the next day we stopped at the Mission and watched the golden red and blue flowers pulling like tigers in the wind. set this to metric: the bull, and the fort of Christ: the matador on his knees, the dead bull his baby; and the priest staring from the window like a caged bear. you may argue in the marketplace and pull at your doubts with silken strings: I will only tell you this: I have lived in both their temples, believing all and nothing—perhaps, now, they will die in mine. the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window (#ulink_a61df8c7-04d1-516e-b0d8-d12df195f59d) I am watching a girl dressed in a light green sweater, blue shorts, long black stockings; there is a necklace of some sort but her breasts are small, poor thing, and she watches her nails as her dirty white dog sniffs the grass in erratic circles; a pigeon is there too, circling, half dead with a tick of a brain and I am upstairs in my underwear, 3 day beard, pouring a beer and waiting for something literary or symphonic to happen; but they keep circling, circling, and a thin old man in his last winter rolls by pushed by a girl in a Catholic school dress; somewhere there are the Alps, and ships are now crossing the sea; there are piles and piles of H- and A-bombs, enough to blow up fifty worlds and Mars thrown in, but they keep circling, the girl shifts buttocks, and the Hollywood Hills stand there, stand there full of drunks and insane people and much kissing in automobiles, but it’s no good: che sar?, sar?: her dirty white dog simply will not shit, and with a last look at her nails she, with much whirling of buttocks walks to her downstairs court trailed by her constipated dog (simply not worried), leaving me looking at a most unsymphonic pigeon. well, from the looks of things, relax: the bombs will never go off. the swan (#ulink_ffeef042-e639-55ee-9b5f-23e6630176c0) swans die in the spring too and there it floated dead on a Sunday sideways circling in current and I walked to the rotunda and overhead gods in chariots dogs, women circled, and death ran down my throat like a mouse, and I heard the people coming with their picnic bags and laughter, and I felt guilty for the swan as if death were a thing of shame and like a fool I walked away and left them my beautiful swan. beans with garlic (#ulink_8092f54a-476f-58d0-b6c6-a8f8f399ffc8) this is important enough: to get your feelings down, it is better than shaving or cooking beans with garlic. it is the little we can do this small bravery of knowledge and there is of course madness and terror too in knowing that some part of you wound up like a clock can never be wound again once it stops. but now there’s a ticking under your shirt and you whirl the beans with a spoon, one love dead, one love departed another love . . . ah! as many loves as beans yes, count them now sad, sad your feelings boiling over flame, get this down. a poem is a city (#ulink_97afd76e-d614-5145-9260-54ba7270348b) a poem is a city filled with streets and sewers filled with saints, heroes, beggars, madmen, filled with banality and booze, filled with rain and thunder and periods of drought, a poem is a city at war, a poem is a city asking a clock why, a poem is a city burning, a poem is a city under guns its barbershops filled with cynical drunks, a poem is a city where God rides naked through the streets like Lady Godiva, where dogs bark at night, and chase away the flag; a poem is a city of poets, most of them quite similar and envious and bitter . . . a poem is this city now, 50 miles from nowhere, 9:09 in the morning, the taste of liquor and cigarettes, no police, no lovers walking the streets, this poem, this city, closing its doors, barricaded, almost empty, mournful without tears, aging without pity, the hardrock mountains, the ocean like a lavender flame, a moon destitute of greatness, a small music from broken windows . . . a poem is a city, a poem is a nation, a poem is the world . . . and now I stick this under glass for the gaunt mad editor’s scrutiny, and night is elsewhere and faint gray ladies stand in line, dog follows dog to estuary, the trumpets bring on gallows as small men rant at things they cannot do. consummation of grief (#ulink_25b071fb-235a-50a1-a64b-fcc52786f033) I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry and all the water is their tears. I listen to the water on nights I drink away and the sadness becomes so great I hear it in my clock it becomes knobs upon my dresser it becomes paper on the floor it becomes a shoehorn a laundry ticket it becomes cigarette smoke climbing a chapel of dark vines . . . it matters little very little love is not so bad or very little life what counts is waiting on walls I was born for this I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead. for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough (#ulink_c5855056-177a-53fa-9fe9-54fec1e56229) I pick up the skirt, I pick up the sparkling beads in black, this thing that moved once around flesh, and I call God a liar, I say anything that moved like that or knew my name could never die in the common verity of dying, and I pick up her lovely dress, all her loveliness gone, and I speak to all the gods, Jewish gods, Christ-gods, chips of blinking things, idols, pills, bread, fathoms, risks, knowledgeable surrender, rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad without a chance, hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance, I lean upon this, I lean on all of this and I know: her dress upon my arm: but they will not give her back to me. for Jane (#ulink_9d204e78-fe9c-5dea-a5c0-29c5e54fe74b) 225 days under grass and you know more than I. they have long taken your blood, you are a dry stick in a basket. is this how it works? in this room the hours of love still make shadows. when you left you took almost everything. I kneel in the nights before tigers that will not let me be. what you were will not happen again. the tigers have found me and I do not care. john dillinger and le chasseur maudit (#ulink_04b07df9-3867-59f9-b524-d615d59b555b) it’s unfortunate, and simply not the style, but I don’t care: girls remind me of hair in the sink, girls remind me of intestines and bladders and excretory movements; it’s unfortunate also that ice-cream bells, babies, engine-valves, plagiostomes, palm trees, footsteps in the hall . . . all excite me with the cold calmness of the gravestone; nowhere, perhaps, is there sanctuary except in hearing that there were other desperate men: Dillinger, Rimbaud, Villon, Babyface Nelson, Seneca, Van Gogh, or desperate women: lady wrestlers, nurses, waitresses, whores poetesses . . . although, I do suppose the breaking out of ice-cubes is important or a mouse nosing an empty beercan— two hollow emptinesses looking into each other, or the nightsea stuck with soiled ships that enter the chary web of your brain with their lights, with their salty lights that touch you and leave you for the more solid love of some India; or driving great distances without reason sleep-drugged through open windows that tear and flap your shirt like a frightened bird, and always the stoplights, always red, nightfire and defeat, defeat . . . scorpions, scraps, fardels: x-jobs, x-wives, x-faces, x-lives, Beethoven in his grave as dead as a beet; red wheel-barrows, yes, perhaps, or a letter from Hell signed by the devil or two good boys beating the guts out of each other in some cheap stadium full of screaming smoke, but mostly, I don’t care, sitting here with a mouthful of rotten teeth, sitting here reading Herrick and Spenser and Marvell and Hopkins and Bronte (Emily, today); and listening to the Dvorak Midday Witch or Franck’s Le Chasseur Maudit, actually I don’t care, and it’s unfortunate: I have been getting letters from a young poet (very young, it seems) telling me that some day I will most surely be recognized as one of the world’s great poets. Poet! a malversation: today I walked in the sun and streets of this city: seeing nothing, learning nothing, being nothing, and coming back to my room I passed an old woman who smiled a horrible smile; she was already dead, and everywhere I remembered wires: telephone wires, electric wires, wires for electric faces trapped like goldfish in the glass and smiling, and the birds were gone, none of the birds wanted wire or the smiling of wire and I closed my door (at last) but through the windows it was the same: a horn honked, somebody laughed, a toilet flushed, and oddly then I thought of all the horses with numbers that have gone by in the screaming, gone by like Socrates, gone by like Lorca, like Chatterton . . . I’d rather imagine our death will not matter too much except as a matter of disposal, a problem, like dumping the garbage, and although I have saved the young poet’s letters, I do not believe them but like at the diseased palm trees and the end of the sun, I sometimes look. 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